DW 3B

The reading I have chosen to analyze is Geneva Smitherman's "CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights", which focuses on how the CCCC developed the SRTOL statement, and changed over time. Smitherman points out that the CCCC from its beginnings had discussed how they should deal with different races and cultures of students in the classroom, but nothing had really come out of it. Some small programs had been started before the 1960's, but the "turning point" that Smitherman points out, was when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. After this event in 1968, Ernece B. Kelly delivered the "Murder of the American Dream" speech, which started a domino effect of outrage at how the CCCC hardly ever talked about preserving Black English as a diverse and unique language. In response, the CCCC developed a committee that Smitherman herself was a part of. However, just like the responses of the past, the committee and its achievements were relatively small-scale, which is the main point that Smitherman makes in the article.

As for AAVE in compositional studies, Smitherman tends to focus more on the general issue of the SRTOL, which isn't strictly focused on AAVE. On the other hand, it is definitely the most frequently referenced by her peers that she quotes in her article, most likely because it is one of the most commonly encountered different dialects that can face problems in the educational system. Smitherman talks about the resolution focused on three main points, one being that the richness of different dialects should be embraced in schools and talk to students. This exact same point is also brought up in a more recent article done by Valerie Felita Kinloch, titled "Revisiting the Promise of Student's Right to Their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies". In her article, she states that "...it is significant that the resolution forced people to examine pedagogy of previously ignored students." (Kinloch 87). When they bring up this point of embracing such dialects, they mainly give examples and talk about black dialect, but there is in no way a barrier keeping the point to AAVE speakers. Kinloch later talks about a Chinese student that she had, who in her 12th grade class, was advised by her teacher to, "...downplay my accent because of what she thinks is my unpriveledged background." (96).

In general, Smitherman's article does not really teach the reader specifically about the role of AAVE in compositional studies, other than how it is a controversial section of CCCC discussion, which has undergone some changes since the SRTOL. As mentioned before, she sees it as an important part of advancing the SRTOL that students be taught about AAVE and other dialects, and how they are constructed and centered on different rules. Later on, she also talks about the CCCC National Language Policy, which seeks to help all students obtain "...oral and literate competence in English..." (Smitherman 369), while keeping their native tongues alive. By focusing mainly on the change of pedagogy and the classrooms, Smitherman is therefore also focusing mainly on teachers, which only provides one half of the story for change (leaving this an incomplete point on AAVE's effect in compositional studies). All of Kinloch's qualitative data is based on discussions of things like SRTOL, with students, and how they responded and were very motivated to do good amounts of research and work in the subject. After one semester teaching students with focus on different dialects like AAVE, she states that they, "...witnessed how the resolution could indeed be implemented inside a classroom focused on student involvement and student voice..." (Kinloch 98). Therefore, Kinloch believes that discussion about such issues is the first step in implementing SRTOL, which is also backed by Smitherman in her definition of SRTOL's point. However, Kinloch's example had a very diverse classroom where different dialects were very prevalent, so I also think that Smitherman would call her results a small gain, that would need to include classrooms of mainly Standard English users too, in order to truly start to change the way the world looks at different dialects, and in particular, AAVE.